Our workload increased by the day, our ideas grew bigger and our team needed more members to tread the path it had envisioned for itself. We placed ads on LinkedIn and other social media platforms and asked friends and acquaintances to help us find a development team. Many people came and went. Some even stayed with our team for a while as interns but after a month despite all the promises that had been made they couldn’t achieve anything. Everything became more complicated than the beginning because building something from scratch is much easier than fixing something that has been built wrong. What were we supposed to do? We were returning to where we were a month before.

We were struggling with these concerns when someone suggested a PHP developer named Salman Akbari to us. We invited Salman to the office for an interview he radiated positive energy and was very experienced despite his young age. We decided to invite Salman to join our team.

The only problem was that Salman was doing his national service and could only come to the office part time.

With Salman on board, the Development team now consisted of him, Hamid Beiki as Graphic Designer and Mohammad Ghayati as IT Consultant. He started work by choosing a new theme.

Hooman introduced us to Farbod Morshedzadeh, who is one of the most talented painters in Iran and has held several exhibitions. Farbod is studying for a PhD in History of Art and he proposed we have an Iranology class so that the team would learn more about Iran, its history, culture, art and architecture. The toiran team eagerly welcomed this suggestion and we began our classes starting with the history of ancient Persia. The Iranology classes increased our knowledge and allowed us to come together as a team and learn about Iran-the reason we were here in the first place. These classes and discussions brought us closer in our thinking and led to new ideas.

We also asked Hooman Nobakht to hold a photography class for us to enable us to document and share our experiences when traveling in Iran. This also allowed the technology, art and cultural departments to learn about one another’s work and had a positive effect on team spirit and our teamwork. These classes taught us the fundamentals of photography and smartphone photography, which was good for our team.